This essay situates the rise of US empire in the nineteenth century within a longer, transnational, and transoceanic colonial project that has been continuously catastrophic – from the arrival of Columbus to the threats of climate change and nuclear disaster – for both Indigenous societies and nonhuman ecosystems. The essay shows how such ecological and geopolitical disruptions were central to both US nation-building and the development of an American national literature, while at the same time highlighting the causal relation and essential continuity between the extractive enterprises and imperial expansionism of the early United States and the planetary crises of the twenty-first century.

Returning to David Walker’s Appeal, with an exclusive focus on its 1848 publication, this chapter traces the connections between the 1848 anti-monarchical revolutions in Europe, the Mexican American War, and an emerging vision of Black resistance to American Empire. This chapter reads Walker together with the works of Henry Highland Garnet and decisively demonstrates how African American literature articulated the principles and priorities of a transnational 1848.